Recent Comments

Archives

Categories

Category: poetry

I don’t enjoy being angry,it’s just more productive than being sad.so, with a frustrated groan,

I pull on my leggings and tank top and drag myself to my kickboxing class.

god forbid I acknowledge my feelings,

unable to tell if this is laziness or grief.

my body, a bag of iron filings,

heavy like sand and flopped down on my magnetic bed. my mind, full of ghost cars driving at a snail’s pace down an empty and endless highway.

I lay there, exhausted,

craving energy and warmth and hope,

anything that will shake me

from this nightmare I can’t seem to wake up from.

all I can think of about is her,with the noose around my neck. I handed her the other end of the rope,and as she walked awayshe left my gasping for air,speechless.

I told her I didn’t love herbecause I don’t know what love was.child of a broken home,where love looked like dodged kisses, blocked doorways, and a threat locked away in a safe, loaded with bullets.

how could I understand what love was?

I told her I didn’t love her,refusing to assign a label to the feelings I had. I want to put my hands in hers,but instead, I focus on the way my fists strike the punching bag.I am tired.I don’t enjoy being angry.

Another Friday afternoon spent avoiding the elephant in the room, with conversation as shallow as a kiddie pool. You pick her up from school, but she’s not your little girl anymore.

She’s no fool; she’ bigger now, wiser now, sees right through your lies and now she’s harder to manipulate—she speaks up. No longer afraid to irritate you, she won’t hesitate to debate you.

At dinner, irate. Trying to tell you the details of her day, change the subject, push her away, because you always need to have it your way.

But I still try to make excuses for you, telling myself you care, just more about the other side of the family than me.

You’re making it so hard to defend you, throwing blame, acting like you’re trying to mend things. You bend things, twisting words in my brain until I have a headache.

The questions you like to ask are not the ones I want to answer, yet you pry and you pry, saying, “what do you have to hide?” Casting your own blame aside, a reason for everything, always justified.

You’re blind to the harm you caused, convincing everyone that you’re “kind.” You say that you don’t mean to be mean, but you act like you can’t tell the difference between showing concern and being intrusive.

You think you’re the hero, saving lives—running around with the defibrillator, not checking for a pulse before you send electrical shocks to a heart that does not need to be restarted.

Every day is another fight, wrong vs right, truth vs lie, intruding in someone else’s life. Ask about me. Ask about your daughter. Stop asking about my aunts, uncles, cousins, or anyone related to my mother.

After countless times of asking you not to put me in the middle, I am still the rope in this tug-of-war. You still put me on the spot, turn up the heat like a burger on the griddle. I feel my brain sizzle, the steam flowing out of my ears, because now it’s been 7 years, and you still like to pretend like you don’t get it. Don’t understand how when I ask you to pick me up, sometimes I regret it, but after we fight, you feign your apologies, and forget it.

Your “heart cries in silence”? Mine cries on full blast; you never listen, letting the time pass, but once there’s radio-silence, you have the audacity to ask, “Do you ever miss seeing me…?”

Tear stained skin as she drives,
heading down a street all too familiar to her,
a sky striped with the silhouette of palm trees
and painted a blazing bright scarlet red.

The sharp pain of a vague memory still lingers,
Like a paper cut on her finger,
how everything she touches finds a way to sting her,
but the pain, like a melancholy melody, sings her to sleep.
She weeps.

Trapped in a dream, a desire
A passion that blazed
But burned her with the fire.
The bitter taste of tea
Scalding her tongue,
Love was the oxygen
of now deprived lungs,
Yet the flame within her heart
Has not been extinguished.

How long will it take
for her to get over
an imaginary heartbreak?
How will she heal the invisible scars
of a fire that never happened?